Fast paced Monster Card Game with a unique PvPvE battle system. Two players compete against eachother to earn valuable loot by defeating powerful boss monsters.

Post news Report RSS Ploxmons DevLog #11 - Announcing Animations, Leaderboard

Our dev talks about the recent addition of the leaderboard as well as the plans for improving the visuals of the game. Also: See our first monster animation!

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Ploxmons DevLog #11

- Announcing Animations, Leaderboard

Hello everyone!I hope you are all doing well considering the current difficult situation.However we are using the additional free time to work hard on completing the game.Many changes happened in the last two weeks with lot of new exciting features.

Leaderboard

Most of the time was spent with implementing the leaderboard. The UI was created in a decent amount of time however the required changes on the server took way more time than expected since the temporary ranking system had to be reworked completely. The most difficult task was to create a global leaderboard which live updates after every game a player has played. Considering a potential big amount of players this mechanism had to be extremely efficient to not kill the server on a big game count. After a few days I came up with a solution that should do fine and be stable enough to support a large amount of played games per minute. However since such system can only be validated on big server loads I will keep an eye on this in the next playtest phase.

Leaderboard UI

Overall the leaderboard is a really nice addition to the game since it not only shows your personal statistics like current ranking, played games, winrate but also a global ranking of all players for the existing game modes. Expecially exciting is the new game mode "ranked vs bot" which we introduced together with the new ranking system. This game mode is the same as the known vs bot game mode however you will gain ranking points for this and can climb to higher ranks. This is some kind of relaxing pve experience that makes bot games even more fun.

Still pending is the task to implement the ranking rewards at the end of a season. However since we didn't decide yet how this rewards should look like we postponed this task to a later point. For now there are just some random card packs the higher the achieved rank is.

Visual Changes

After finishing the leaderboard we started our next big task "Improve the look-and-feel of the ingame view".For a long time I have been quite unhappy with the current feel of the ingame screen. Not only is it really confusing for new players it feels also really static.We talked alot about how we can improve the battle feeling and came up with a big bunch of points we want to address. Overall this will take a big amount of time because there are many time consuming changes to do. However after this changes the battle should feel alot more alive, interesting and clear. Here are some of the changes we plan to do:

  • First of all we want to improve clarity of "what is happening on the screen" a lot. After the playtest we received the feedback that it is not really understandable what is going on. We totally agree with that because we didn't spent any time with this so far. So we decided to finally address this task and think about how to solve this issue. This involves clarity of the monster / boss stats (what is the power/speed of a mon, what kind of attack does the boss have - who will it hit? ...). Also we want to make ability executing more visible because currently one can lose track of "who uses which ability" really fast.
  • Secondly we want to rework the visual effects completely because the current effects are really simple and only temporarily. We plan to add some really nice looking visual effects to make using abilites a lot more epic. The fight should feel more alive after this. I am really excited to see how this will turn out after some of the effects are added.
  • A really important point of mine is to improve the look of the monsters. Currently there are only static images with basically no movement at all (except a little floating up and down which is not really convincing). We talked a lot about how we can address this problem with the least amount of required work for us. After researching and discussing we came up with a solution:

We want to try out animating the monsters!

This is a really huge task because we have nearly 100 monsters/bosses. Animating each of them will take a lot of time however we decided that this will be mandatory to upgrade the look-and-feel to a level we are happy with. Also since we have spent many hundreds of hours developing the game we don't want to lack behind graphics which might hold people from playing the game. In the last few days I made myself familiar with how to animate stuff and what requirements there are. After some research we decided to try to animate a few monsters to see how it will look like. And so far I can say: it looks and feels really nice .:) However animations will be really basic and not completely mindblowing since the more interesting animations should be the more time we need. And for 100 monsters this will simply not doable for the two of us since there are other changes left to do.

This is our first animation test for "Champy":

Overall we are really excited about the upcoming changes and how they will turn out. A lot of work to do, many stuff to change. But in the end we will have a much more enjoyable ingame-feeling :)As always thanks for staying by, for supporting us over the last month.

We added a new Patreon Tier!

Every little bit helps us out! If you want to become our patreon and directly support Ploxmons, visit Patreon.com. Your support means everything to us and motivates us to reach the final release. We have 4 patreon tiers currently, each with different rewards.

patreon tier


Where to find us

Join us on our Discord community to get even more insights about the project and to chat with us and the plox community! Our Discord members have acces to playtest the game occasionally.
We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!

Follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook

Support us on Patreon!
Website: Ploxmons.com

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